NKVD Special Squad

 John B put on this cheery game covering special NKVD operations during the Siege of Leningrad in Jan/Feb 1942. I recall one historian (John Collier perhaps?) commenting that 'special' in WW2 usually meant something really, really bad for the participants.

There isn't a great deal of eye candy in these games I'm afraid, but we did assemble a motley array of hats. Jerry and I were in Ushankas, John in a soviet sidecap and Tim had his Russian bus conductors hat. 

The Siege of Leningrad was a fairly awful experience for the Russians and mass starvation was rife over the winter of 1941 as supplies ran out and the 'ice road' supply route was very tenuous. In fact our mission wasn't particularly grim, there was criminal involvement in organised cannibalism with suspected links to rogue Party elements and we had to root them out. That all sounded like quite a worthy thing to be doing.

So we actually ended up doing the same sort of things as in our Berlin Noir games series, investigating crimes, doing some double dealing ourselves and dealing with corrupt officials. Slightly fewer demons in this game, although we do have to worry about Uncle Joe et al.

The game was much enlivened by the various maps and props which John produced. I was cast as Lt MA Alabian, Chekist and interrogation specialist. Our team had the usual mix of skills and characters, including a weapons expert, beaurocrat (very useful in the USSR) and even a shadowy figure from the external security branch.

Leningrad in the winter of 1941 was a very dangerous place to wander around, so much of the time we spent figuring out how to get from A to B without being set upon by bandits as nearly all the security forces were fighting at the front.

I wouldn't say our investigation went swimmingly well, we did uncover a link to a very senior Party figure, who as a personal friend of Stalin, was rather untouchable, as well as some links to dealings in the Baltic States. I won't go into too much detail on the game as John may well wish to run it again at some point, this being its third outing.

Eventually we did determine a suspicious location to investigate and got as far as mounting an armed raid (contemporary map of Leningrad above), sadly the baddies had been tipped off and we encountered a booby trap which wounded two of our party.

We did manage to get some leads however, and we will follow up with another foray at some point in the future to see if we can wrap things up. Afterwards John informed us that our casualty rate had been rather low, on one previous game only two members of the team survived! On our return to the Big House, we did find our commanding NKVD General had been summoned to Moscow, never to be seen again. I guess we stepped on someones toes.

Like the Bernie Winter/Geroen Rath games, that was a load of fun, and as we've all known each other for years, we worked well as an effective team. Playing over Zoom actually added to the experience as it gave plenty of opportunity for sending hidden messages, very important in the paranoid atmosphere of Stalins Russia.  Sadly for regular blog readers, it isn't very conducive to pictures or detailed narration, so I'll leave it there.